Chapter 1: Rain-Wedding

Third watch of the night, and the rain came off the ridge in one long sheet, the kind that lays the grass flat in the ruts and leaves it there. Sixteen of them were on the track above Cedar Hollow with a bridal litter between them, and not one of the sixteen was dry.

Hollis Quay walked at the back of the line, because he was no use on the poles. His stick went down and came up and went down again. The water had been over the tops of his boots since the second mile, and the cloth had gone soft and pulled loose from the soles in two places, and every step he took made a small wet sound like a rag being wrung out.

The broker walked first, a white paper lantern hung off his arm. It had gone soft in the wet and burned dull, but it was light enough to show his face: narrow brows, and two round spots of rouge worked into his cheeks with a thumb, still red under all that water, as though he had put them on before daylight and meant them to hold until morning.

He looked back along the line and stopped.

“A wedding,” he said. “This here is a wedding. Would it kill any one of you to look pleased about it?”

They tried. Teeth came out into the lantern light on faces that belonged behind a coffin, and the trying made it worse.

“I sell weddings,” the broker said. “Grave-weddings, mostly, since that’s what pays up here. There’s people on this ridge nobody in the valley will have, and there’s other things that want a wife and can’t come down the hill to ask for one, and I do the business between them. A man in my trade has got his name and what people say about him and that’s the whole of it, and here I am walking up a mountain with sixteen faces on me like the end of everything.”

He had been out in it since dark. The rain ran off the brim of his hat, and he did not put a hand to it.

“Three years of dust,” he said. “You know how many went in the ground in this hollow over three years of dust. I knelt on the bare stones up here for you. I put my forehead to the rock and knocked until the skin broke open, and the rain came. All I ever asked back was one little bride.” He looked at the litter. “One.”

“Sir.” Hollis got himself up the side of the litter to the man, wet to the elbows. “Don’t be hard on them.”

The broker waited.

“There’s no rain on this ridge that didn’t come from you,” Hollis said. “Nobody up here forgets it. Nobody.” He turned his head and said something short over his shoulder to the line, and when he came back around the sourness had been put away and a smile had been brought out in its place. “When this is done there’s a table laid for you down at the house. Hot food on it. A bed, and a roof over it that doesn’t leak. You’ve earned it. We’ve got all night.”

“A table out of what?” the broker said. “Your ground’s been dead three years. There isn’t an onion in this hollow worth the mud it came out of.” He shifted the lantern from one arm to the other, and Hollis saw his hands: small and neat and very clean for a man who had been out in the rain all night. “I’ll make the offering and be off. I don’t sleep up here.”

Hollis said yes to all of it and put a hand on the man’s arm as if to steady him over a rut.

He had gone up past the last fence by himself three nights running and said it out loud to nothing in particular, and on the fourth night the rain had come. The broker had bought it with his knees. He had said so once tonight and would say it again, and nobody had ever put the question to the two of them, and nobody in the hollow wanted an answer to it. Hollis kept his hand where it was and kept his mouth shut.

They came around the shoulder of the ridge, and there was a stone at the side of the track, half the height of a man, with the rain running off the top of it in lines. The broker put the lantern up to it.

“Temple’s up the path,” he said.

Hollis stopped in front of the stone, because he knew the writing on it. The weather had cut the letters shallow. They were letters, anyway. He had seen that writing once in his life: he had been nine or ten, sent down the valley to sit behind the sons of a house that had money, to carry their books and their ink for them so the master would keep him fed, and one of those books had two pages of it, folded over and put away, and he had gotten a look at them for the length of one afternoon when nobody was watching. Only the Chancery’s clerks ever learn that language — the one they write the gods down in. Nobody else in the hollow had read a word of it. Hollis had come away from that afternoon with the shapes of the letters and nothing that was inside them.

“It’s a stone,” the broker said. “Come on.”

Past the bend he stopped and worked a square of paper out of his sleeve with a mark drawn on it, and shook it out into the rain. It burned without going to ash. A thin blue edge traveled around it, and a smell came off it like a match just blown out, and what was left hung in the air at the height of his shoulder: a guide-lamp, folded paper with a wick in it the size of a pea, burning green.

“Move,” he said. “The hour’s fixed and I don’t mean to miss it.”

They followed it. It went where the path went, and where the path gave out at the top of the ridge it kept going, and they went after it, and a quarter of an hour later, maybe twenty minutes, it stopped.

There was a temple there.

It stood by itself on the open shoulder of the hill, gray as the rock it sat on, with a door in the front of it and no track leading up to the door, and no fence, and no well, and nothing anywhere near it that a building would want to have near it. It looked like a thing somebody had set down by hand on the hill and walked away from.

The broker went in first. The rest of them went in after him, because there was nothing else on that ridge to follow.

The wind came through the door with them. It took the paper lantern off the broker’s arm and put the flame out with one motion, and after that the room had the guide-lamp in it and nothing else — one green light at the broker’s shoulder, and sixteen people standing in a dark they had not been in before. Hollis put a hand back to steady the man behind him and said, “Keep your feet. Keep your feet, it’s only a room.”

The lamp’s reach was short: boards underfoot, an altar at the far end with a god-tag nailed up over it and cloth hanging down the wall behind, and past that a few paces of nothing at all.

He got both hands on his stick and set his weight down on it. “Hold the poles,” he said. “Hold the litter, don’t set it down—“

The litter went down anyway. The curtain rod broke across, the front of it hit the boards, and the crack went around the room and came back off the walls before anybody got a hand on the poles. The bride rolled out and lay in the green light.

It was a log. Somebody had cut it to about the length of a person and put it in a bridal litter and carried it up a mountain.

The broker was on it before anybody else moved. He took it up in both hands, and then his face did a thing Hollis had never watched a face do. The smile he had been wearing all night stayed exactly where it was, and everything under it went away.

“You brought me a log,” he said. “You brought a log up my mountain, you mangy old dog.”

Hollis was already down. He had gone to his knees somewhere in the last few steps, and the stick lay across his lap.

“Sir. Listen to me. Three years of dying out here, and we have buried most of what we had. I couldn’t take a girl out of her mother’s house and hand her over to whatever it is you sell them to. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have brought you up this hill on a lie if there’d been any other way to get the rain.”

The broker laughed, one short note, flat, with nothing behind it.

“You couldn’t do it,” he said. “I know you couldn’t do it. Old man, I’ve been in this trade a long while.” He set the log down against the litter, almost gently, and brushed the wet off his hands. “Did you think the bride was the part of it I came up the hill for?”

He looked along the line at all of them.

“Sixteen,” he said. “Sixteen of you walked up here on your own feet. Mister Sable’s got teeth like a gate, and he wants a bride’s worth of dinner every day he’s alive, and I’ve been keeping him waiting while it rained on your fields. He’s had nothing for four days.”

Hollis saw then that the man had two small hooks at the corners of his mouth, curled up into his cheeks, and he could not have said when they had come. Like the rouge. Painted on.

“I told you what I do,” the broker said. “I make matches. This is a match. It always was.”

Hollis got a hand under himself and pushed up on the stick. “Out,” he said to the line. “All of you, out the door. We’ve been sold. Go—“

Nobody went anywhere. The door was behind the broker.

The broker turned over inside his coat. Hollis would have no other way to hold it in his mind afterward: the shoulders came around further than shoulders go, the way a rope takes a twist, and the coat went with them, sliding, and the wide brown sleeves went out flat in the air, and the guide-lamp was up in both his hands.

“This house only lets out the dead,” he said. “You want out? All right. Mister Sable — come and eat.”

The hangings at the end of the room came off the wall. There was no wind left in there and they came off the wall anyway, down over the front of the line, and somebody screamed, and then somebody else did, and then all of them were screaming.

The four little bells on the litter went off together and would not stop.

Then something took hold of Hollis from behind. There were no hands in it. It came out of the far end of the room, out from under the altar where the god-tag was nailed up and the green light did not reach; the dark under there went back deeper than the wall the altar stood against. It drew him backward across the boards on his knees, and it took the rest of them along with him.

The broker stood with the guide-lamp in his two hands and his face up, laughing at the roof.

Hollis heard it in his own head, in his own voice: he should have come up this hill by himself tonight. One old man, one old life, paid over, and the rain bought. He had brought sixteen up instead.

He got the stick under his chest and got his chin up.

“Mister Sable!” he shouted at the altar. “You hear me in there. There’s nobody in this valley at fault for the rain but me. You want somebody tonight, take me first.”

Then he put his face down on the floor in front of the altar with his arms over his head and shut his eyes.

The pull did not stop. He could hear the others’ feet going along the boards, and the bells, and the man behind him laughing. The guide-lamp was still in the broker’s hands, and the green of it came through his shut eyes. He lay with his face on the boards and waited.